Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Tuesday defended the pace of permitting of deep- and shallow-water drilling before the Senate Energy Committee and said that continued complaints amounted to nothing but Washington "noise."

"I account for the noise that goes around this issue as simply the kind of noise that you see here in Washington, D.C.," Salazar said.

"They may hear it as noise but it's necessary for us to be clear about what is being done and what is not being done so we can solve this problem," said Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La, who fenced with Salazar and Michael Bromwich, Interior's top regulator of offshore drilling, over what she said were "disingenuous" permitting numbers from a department she said remains in a "prosecutorial mode as opposed to an implementation mode."

Senate looks at oil issues

The confrontation over permitting numbers came on a day in which the full Senate turned its attention to gas prices, oil company profits and energy policy, closing with Senate Democrats, on a 52-48 vote, falling short of winning the 60 votes needed to proceed with a bill to remove $21 billion in tax incentives and deductions for the five largest oil companies over the next 10 years.

Landrieu, one of three Democrats to vote with all but two Republicans to block consideration of the bill, said she won't vote for any drilling legislation if it doesn't include accelerated sharing of the revenues from offshore oil and gas drilling with Louisiana and other coastal states. That includes the drilling bill sponsored by Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the GOP leader, to be taken up today, that both Landrieu and Sen. David Vitter, in an unusual joint statement, said would slow permitting and do nothing to accelerate revenue sharing.

"We do not today get one single solitary penny from a lease, a bonus, or a severance from any of these wells" in federal waters, Landrieu said at the Senate Energy hearing. "No matter what law we pass, this senator will not vote for anything unless there is some recognition of the platform that our state serves to this industry, or nobody would be getting any money, any energy, any oil, any gas."

Landrieu said absent revenue sharing, which doesn't begin until 2017, she'd love to turn the spigot off on oil and gas to the rest of the country. "If I could, I would."

She added, "I don't know what our delegation was thinking in the House," in approving three bills on drilling and leasing "without revenue sharing. I know that their hearts are in the right place, I know they're trying to do the best they can and that the politics of the House is different."

Rep. John Fleming, R-Minden, replied by blaming past Democratic congresses for failing to move up revenue sharing, and questioning why Landrieu would "vote against any bill that would produce more American oil, create real jobs in Louisiana and lower gas prices that are hovering at $4 per gallon."

From the moment the administration imposed a moratorium on deepwater drilling in the aftermath of the BP oil spill last year, Gulf Coast lawmakers, especially form Louisiana, have attacked the moratorium, and, when it was lifted, what they came to call a "de facto moratorium," a "permitorium" or "slowmatorium."

Salazar testified that the administration is determined to get back to drilling "in a way that's safe and protects the environment" and that "we are just not about talking the talk, we are about walking the walk in terms of drilling in our country."

Bromwich said the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement has approved permits for 14 new deepwater wells since two groups unveiled emergency containment systems that operators could use in their permit applications.

"Do the math," Bromwich said. "We've permitted unique deepwater wells on the average of about one every four to five business days since containment capabilities were available. That's not a significantly slower pace than has historically been the case. So the notion that it's taken us a very long time to permit deepwater applications is really not true."

Quarreling over 'the math'

But, in questioning from Landrieu, Bromwich acknowledged that all but one of those permits were for wells that had been permitted before the moratorium.

"They had been drilling prior to the Deepwater Horizon," said Landrieu, who said the real backlog at Interior was in pending exploration plans, which have to be approved before operators can seek permits.

"My information is that there are 100 exploration plans that are pending at BOEM. Is that your understanding?" Landrieu asked Bromwich.

Bromwich also said that shallow-water permitting was nearly back to the "historical level," but Jim Noe, executive director of the Shallow Water Energy Security Coalition, said Bromwich's "historical level" was 2009, "a time of record slow demand driven by the worst recession in our lifetime."